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Yazaki Deploys Wire Harness Production Application Based on Open CASCADE

Developed to support wire harness design tasks, this new application speeds the production of 2D cabling schemes, thereby helping to ensure safety and performance in 1 out of 5 automobiles on the market today.

Using Open CASCADE for product data management and 2D visualization, the Yazaki Corporation of Japan has successfully completed deployment of its new application for the production of automotive wire harnesses for all leading Japanese and international carmakers. The application automates the wire harness design and production cycle, providing rapid access to information while improving quality and reducing costs. The CAE Wire Harness application is installed on 550 seats in Yazaki's factories around the world.

The wire harness functions as the electronic nervous system of an automobile. To answer the challenge of the growing number of electronic devices that have caused the number of wires per vehicle to more than double in the last ten years, Yazaki has developed many innovations that aim to reduce wire diameter and weight, as well as cabling complexity. The CAE wire harness application includes a number of features that take into account these innovations and facilitate their incorporation into harness design.

The application was developed jointly by Yazaki and Nippon Steel Solutions. In addition to the data management and 2D visualization components, the Open CASCADE company provided a wide range of development services, including technical on-site assistance, a Platinum support solution and specific developments to fit the Open CASCADE components to Yazaki's particular needs.

GREATER AUTOMATION OF THE CABLE DESIGN PROCESS
After receiving the cabling model from the carmaker, Yazaki engineers use the application to reproduce the model drawing interactively on screen in order to design how the wire harness will be produced. The application allows generating cables and verifying their length and the information necessary for wire harness production. Once the design is verified, a full-size drawing is printed and sent to the factory for production.

Open CASCADE components are necessary for on-screen visualization of the harness, as well as for the interactive services allowing the user to manipulate the model. In addition, Yazaki and Nippon Steel Solutions used the Open CASCADE Application Framework and foundation classes to cut development process time in half.

According to Masaaki Tanikawa, manager of the Third Development Department in the IT Division at Yazaki, "Open CASCADE is unique on the market. We chose to use it because of its large number of independent, open-source development components and tools, which can be readily integrated into CAE projects like the wire harness application. Since our application brings together different development environments, we were thus able to choose the most appropriate and cost-effective development tools for our project."